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STILL HAUNTED BY COVENANT

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It is difficult to meditate on Yiddish literature without a degree of pathos, particularly if the language of one's own childhood was Yiddish. I recall reading poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Mani Leyb and H. Leivick when I was still a boy, at about the time I first read William Blake and Hart Crane. The memories now are all mixed together; but memory, I am convinced, is a prime mode of cognition both in criticism and in poetry, and I begin to understand that Halpern, Crane, Leivick and Blake each helped me learn how to read the others. Now, two distinguished anthologies - ''The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse'' and ''American Yiddish Poetry'' - help me consider the American Jewish poetry of my own generation, particularly the achievement of Irving Feldman and John Hollander, both of whom contribute remarkable translations to the Penguin volume. That inspires me to make this a kind of double estimate, of both modes of Jewish poetry, Yiddish poetry and poetry by American Jews that is written in English but that emerges from the ethos of Jewish culture.

In their introduction to the Penguin book, Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk warn against mere nostalgia, and Benjamin and Barbara Harshav make the point even more severely in an essay that opens ''American Yiddish Poetry.'' Yiddish is waning as a living language, but we need not surrender to its murderers, Hitlerian and Stalinist, by going into permanent mourning for it; 1,000 years of Jewish culture center themselves in the Yiddish language, side by side with related cultural achievements in Ladino, Hebrew, Arabic and all the languages of the West. Whatever the changes Judaism and secular Jewishness undergo in the generations ahead, Jewish identity will continue to have links, overt and hidden, with Yiddish literature. A caring analysis and selection of Yiddish poetry, offered by both anthologies, aid immensely in making materials available toward that continuity.

I find that the two anthologies nicely supplement each other, since the Harshavs focus on seven major American Jewish poets, each in some depth, and address their work to literary scholars, while Mr. Howe and his colleagues cover the entire range of modern Yiddish poetry - European, American, even Israeli -and clearly intend their book for the common reader. The translations in the Penguin volume are greatly superior, hardly surprising since Mr. Howe and his collaborators have relied heavily on Mr. Hollander, an almost miraculous renderer of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Mani Leyb, Itsik Fefer (one of the many Yiddish writers murdered by Stalin), as well as on Mr. Feldman, whose versions of Joseph Rolnik, Zishe Landau and Kadya Molodovsky all manifest a precise ear for the nuances and cadences of the original. But nearly all of the translators in this anthology maintain a high level of rapport with the original texts. I wish Benjamin and Barbara Harshav had enhanced the already great scholarly value of their collection by providing plain prose translations of the poems, in the manner of T. Carmi's ''Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse.''

For the most part, their versions are very reliable as to form, but fail to convey the intrinsic qualities of the best poems included here. But that is the only blemish in ''American Yiddish Poetry,'' and it does not seriously diminish the extraordinary achievement of the book.

What emerges from both anthologies are two major poets by the standards of any modern language, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Jacob Glatstein, and a group just short of that eminence, including Mani Leyb, H. Leivick, Abraham Sutzkever (now writing in Israel) and two poets destroyed under Stalin, Perets Markish and Moyshe Kulbak. Mani Leyb, a poet of immense rhetorical charm and esthetic fervor, is a kind of Yiddish John Clare. The opening stanza of his ''I Am . . .'' is beautifully rendered by John Hollander: I am Mani Leyb, whose name is sung - In Brownsville, Yehupets, and farther, they know it: Among cobblers, a splendid cobbler; among Poetical circles, a splendid poet.

With Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, we come to the most distinctive voice, style and stance in all of Yiddish poetry, and to a literary persona of endless, bitter nuance and complexity. Sometimes, reading Halpern, one believes the voice is that of Yiddish culture itself - compassionate yet outraged; bewilderingly funny but with a humor edging into nightmare; grotesquely ironic and crossing over into nihilism, yet longing for community; and haunted still by covenant, always anxiously expectant of the transcendental and extraordinary. In an earlier anthology, ''A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry'' (1969), Mr. Howe made the best remark I have seen on Halpern's predicament: ''In another culture he might become a desperado like Rimbaud or an aristocrat of letters like Stefan George; but here he has no choice, he dies in the East Bronx.'' Halpern ought to be untranslatable into English, but Mr. Hollander has the same way with Halpern that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had with Dante's shorter poems. Here is the start of ''Memento Mori'' in Mr. Hollander's agile version: And if Moyshe-Leyb, Poet, recounted how He's glimpsed Death in the breaking waves, the way You catch that sight of yourself in the mirror At about 10 A.M. on some actual day, Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leyb?

Halpern always strained his own credulity while confronting evidences of the reality of American Jewish immigrant existence. A phantasmagoric mode of parody became his fairly constant resource, producing masterpieces like ''The Bird,'' ''The Tale of the Fly,'' ''The Will'' and the cycle called ''Shtotgortn.'' Mr. Hollander renders Halpern with the Yiddish master's own savage gusts, as in the opening stanza of ''The Bird'': So this bird comes, and under his wing is a crutch, And he asks why I keep my door on the latch; So I tell him that right outside the gate Many robbers watch and wait To get at the hidden bit of cheese. . . .

Benjamin and Barbara Harshav print a generous selection of Halpern's two-volume ''Posthumous Poems'' (1934) and suggest that the poet, who died at the age of 46, was about to cross into even stronger achievements. The valiant efforts of the Harshavs and of Kathryn Hellerstein, an experienced translator of Halpern, do not persuade me that late Halpern can be got from Yiddish into English, but the tangled originals (many from manuscript) certainly are the most powerful poetry ever written in Yiddish. Kafka's mouse people, in his testamentary story ''Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk,'' are matched by Halpern's ''Shalamouses,'' or schlemiel mice, who seem to parody those Jewish Stalinists who lacked the sense to follow Halpern out of the Stalinist fold, while the mad litany ''Mayn Shrayendikeyt'' (''My Screamingness''), given here in two versions by the Harshavs, is one of the more awesome modern poems in any language. H. Leivick is not very fully represented in the Penguin anthology (and perhaps has receded in Mr. Howe's estimation, since in ''A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry,'' edited by Mr. Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, he received about twice as much coverage). Here Mr. Howe has preserved two fine lyric translations of Leivick by the novelist Cynthia Ozick, but I miss her versions of ''Here Lives the Jewish People'' and several other visionary meditations. To get any real sense of Leivick, who carried in him the authentic ethos of Yiddish poetry, the reader is better off with the Harshav volume, which presents this poignant figure as the secular saint he seems to have been. Arrested after the Russian Revolution of 1905 because of his membership in the Jewish Socialist Bund, Leivick endured forced labor in prison and then exile in Siberia, from which he escaped in 1913. A messianic intensity and a mystique of suffering subsequently pervaded his life and his poetry. The effect of his poetry, at least on me, is very ambivalent, since its high-pitched pathos veers quite suddenly from a sublimity, in which a victim possesses tragic dignity, to the dangerous edge of masochism.

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Mani Leyb, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and H. Leivick were the principal poets of the group called the Young Ones, who came together in the United States around 1907 (Leivick arrived later). The major American Jewish poet after Halpern was Jacob Glatstein, who arrived in the United States in 1914 and died in New York City in 1971. Wickedly but lovingly portrayed as the poet in search of a translator in Cynthia Ozick's early masterpiece ''Envy, or Yiddish in America,'' Glatstein ironically has benefited from many skilled translators, including Ms. Ozick herself, Ruth Whitman, Chana Bloch, Leonard Wolf, Marie Syrkin and most recently Richard J. Fein. The founder, with A. Glanz-Leyeles and N. B. Minkoff, of the magazine In Zikh (Within the Self), Glatstein began as the advocate of a new inwardness in Yiddish poetry. Simply, what he advocated was an American Romanticism, self-conscious and self-reliant; both these new anthologies mistakenly brand it literary modernism, but that itself is only a belated version of Romanticism.

The Holocaust made Glatstein not just an elegist for the destruction of the European Jews, but an arguer with God. Reviewing the Howe anthology recently in The New Republic, and writing with amiable good will, Denis Donoghue expressed his bewilderment at a religious tradition that haggles with God, as Mr. Donoghue phrased it. But Glatstein was very much within Jewish tradition, which relies not on belief, as the Roman Catholic tradition does, but rather on a trusting in the covenant between Israel and God. Abraham, walking with God on the road to Sodom, haggles with his Creator in a fruitless but humane attempt to save Sodom, thus setting a pattern that raises what Mr. Donoghue denigrates as haggling to a level of austere sublimity. That sublimity is revived in the final phases of Glatstein's poetry, as in his ''Genesis.'' In Cynthia Ozick's version, the poet concludes with an appeal for Yahweh to abandon a universalism that has served badly both the Jewish people and their God: We followed You into Your wide world and sickened there. Save Yourself, return with Your pilgrims who go up to a little land. Come back, be our Jewish God again.

This outrageous but esthetically winning pathos dominates Glatstein's late poems, never more poignantly than in the pity-rejecting conclusion of ''Yiddishkeit,'' as rendered in ''Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn'' by Mr. Fein: Longingkeit-Yiddishkeit is merely a lullaby for old men whose gums knead soaked challah. Should we provide the soft shreds, the bare, the outlived words, we who dreamed of a new Great Synagogue?

Glatstein's question, transposed from Yiddish to American English, can be seen as larger than linguistic in the problematical cultural context of American Jewish writing. It is a paradox that poetry rather than prose fiction is the prime achievement of Yiddish literature in America, while poetry in English by American Jews has not matched the prose achievements of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Harold Brodkey and so many others. There are signs of change in this pattern, but I will confine myself to two poets only, Irving Feldman and John Hollander, a choice influenced not only by their increasing excellence but by their relation to the Yiddish poetry they have translated. Two very different poets they are, but they have in common a profound affinity to the cultural dilemmas, and also some of the cultural resources, of the best Yiddish poets.

To illustrate: all four poems in Mr. Feldman's sequence ''Family History'' have a measure of greatness, but the final one, ''The Singer's Singer,'' has for me extraordinary poignance, partly because I too am the son of an immigrant Jewish tailor. Mr. Feldman's title plays on the Singer sewing machine as his father's harp of David, and the poem ends with an exchange between father and son that is frighteningly universal in its implications. ''What living man would wear your suit?'' Mr. Feldman questions his father, and he receives an overwhelming reply: ''The stone wall of terror on which you break your head: nothing can be thought, nothing can be done - and so, to do something, to think nothing, you break your head. You don't break down. You won't break through. I, too, sew an endless suit to clothe the mist and keep it warm and give it any shape I can. My son, my son, here, please put it on.''

These lines could be regarded, amid much else, as the injunctions of the Yiddish poets Halpern and Glatstein to their esthetic and spiritual heirs, Mr. Feldman and Mr. Hollander and other American Jewish poets. Mr. Hollander, who is still wrongly regarded by some critics as the academic formalist in verse that he was 30 years ago, seems to me to have accomplished, with Mr. Feldman and a few others, the hard quest of becoming an American Jewish poet writing within the strongest aspects of British-American and Judaic tradition. His ''Spectral Emanations'' (1978) is somber American Jewish mythmaking, founded on the metaphor of the menorah, symbolic lamp of seven branches, and his ''Powers of Thirteen'' (1983) internalizes many of the conflicts of Halpern and Glatstein, who struggled to internalize diverse traditions without collapsing into the nightmare of introspection.

Mr. Hollander's subtle masterpiece may be the long poem ''Kinneret'' (1986), named for Yam Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, whose name is related to the Hebrew word kinnor (harp). Something of what Mr. Hollander has learned from the bitter eloquence of the self-styled rascal Moyshe-Leyb Halpern sounds in the complex, allusive splendors of ''Kinneret,'' where the esoteric doctrines of the Gnostic kabbala mingle with an art that masters the breaking of the vessels, the kabbalistic metaphor for the creation through catastrophe that haunts Jewish culture. ''Kinneret'' carries me back to ''Spectral Emanations,'' with its haunting metaphor, derived from the historian Cecil Roth, of a candle set inside a pitcher. Roth told of villagers in northern Portugal who, as late as the 1920's, still lighted candles in pitchers on Friday nights - without knowing why, except that it was an old family custom. Unknowing descendants of Marranos, or Jews who had undergone forced conversion, the villagers provided Mr. Hollander with a tragic metaphor for what yet could become the American Jewish relation to an ancient tradition: Oh, We shall carry it set Down inside a pitcher Out into the field, late Wonderers errant in Among the rich flowers. Like a star reflected In a cup of water, It will light up no path: Neither will it go out.

Does a candle that lights up no path still matter, even if it will not go out? Mr. Hollander has found a way of phrasing what may be the crucial question of American Jewish literature, and what was the central sorrow of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Jacob Glatstein.

Harold Bloom, the 1987-88 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, is writing a commentary on David Rosenberg's translation of the Yahwist portions of the Bible.

A version of this review appears in print on January 31, 1988, on Page 7007003 of the National edition with the headline: STILL HAUNTED BY COVENANT. Today's Paper|Subscribe